Production and dispensing of large quantities of bulk ice is a major industry. Restaurants, cafeteries, "fast food" outlets, food packing companies, military and other government installations, catering trucks and the like all use many pounds of ice each day. Often the quantities used by a single establishment amount to hundreds or even thousands of pounds of ice per day. Similarly much bulk ice is used daily in agriculture for packing fresh produce. Consequently the ice supply industry has developed facilities to produce, store and dispense bulk ice in such large daily quantities.
Such facilities have in the past, however, been severely limited in the amount of ice they could produce and store without resort to additional ice making machines. This has been due to the inability of the facilities to efficiently use the space within their storage chambers. In the conventional ice facility, the storage chamber is basically oriented vertically, with a height much greater than its width or depth, often extending to several stories in height. The ice making equipment is mounted on the top of the vertical chamber and dispenses the ice downwardly into the chamber. When the accumulated ice pile reaches the top of the chamber the ice making equipment shuts off until some ice is removed from the bottom of the pile and the height of the pile drops.
In such a facility the ice cannot be distributed laterally within the chamber, except to the extent that it may drift slightly as it falls. In order to utilize additional horizontal space within the chamber the operator must install additional ice making equipment at spaced intervals across the top of the chamber. This of course adds to the cost of the facility as well as increasing the amount of equipment maintenance and electric power required.
The vertical orientation of the facility is a disadvantage. In many cases it severely limits the locations at which the facility can be placed, since substantial overhead clearance is required. It also makes equipment installation and maintenance difficult, since work must be done many feet above the ground.
Efforts to design horizontally oriented ice facilities have not heretofore been successful. The problem of efficient ice distribution within the storage chamber has been even greater than with the vertical chambers, since there is much less vertical fall distance for the ice and therefore much less opportunity for the falling ice to disperse laterally. In addition, since the ice accumulates in a generally conical pile, it has quickly reached to the level of the ice making machine discharge and caused the machine to shut off, even though the chamber volume outside the conical ice pile remains empty. It is not uncommon for horizontal facilities to operate at only 75% of actual capacity, and often at much lower levels than that.
An efficient horizontal facility would have the clear advantages of being usable in many different locations, even those where overhead clearance is limited, and of permitting convenient and safe maintenance of equipment. It is the purpose of this invention to define such apparatus.